By: Reese Clifford

Every weekend from April through November, Zoe Buckley sells cheesecakes at four different markets around the Portland area. Buckley is the owner of Zoe Ann’s Cheesecakes, her own small business that sells over thirty flavors and has been around for over ten years. But Buckley was not always into the baking scene; in fact, she is a classically trained singer and a self-taught baker. Buckley says that she did not originally see herself getting into the baking business and says that she never grew up baking in her Chicago household and was always focusing her energy on singing.

After graduating high school, Buckley moved across the country from Chicago to Oakland, California to study voice. Buckley was focused on becoming an opera singer and was living with a fellow artist who had a major sweet tooth. Buckley laughs, saying, “She would literally throw me in the kitchen and say ‘don’t come out until you make something for me.’” Baking was on her mind and Buckley changed her mind about becoming a singer, and instead she moved to Jamaica and began working for a travel agency since the self-professed extrovert wanted a more people-oriented career.

Buckley had always intended to move back to the states, so a few years later she moved back to Philadelphia, where she was born. While working in Philadelphia, she began making and bringing in baked goods for her co-workers. Buckley’s friend Aimee Lawlor recalled that, “Zoe saw a picture of a cake in a magazine one day at work and decided to try and re-make it in a way. She did, and that made her realize how good she was and that she could really do this.”. People liked what she was making so much that they offered to pay her for her baked goods and that was one of the main reasons why she started her business.

Right now, Buckley says she is happy with the state of her business. The business consists of only two or three people at most, and she only brings in people to help her occasionally when she needs an extra hand or two in her kitchen. Buckley has gotten many offers from places that want to sell her cheesecakes in bulk, but emphasized that her mission statement has always been about consistency and that she was worried that having “too many hands involved” would change her product. She says, “I wanted someone who came to me and said, ‘you know, I remember when you first started’, and they bought a cake ten years ago and they’re buying one today that is just as good, if not better than it was ten years ago.”